Download or read book Stalin s Outcasts written by Golfo Alexopoulos and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I served not in defense of the bourgeois order, but only for a crumb of bread since I was burdened with five small children.""From 1923 to 1925 I worked as a musician but later my earnings weren't steady and I quickly stopped. Without an income to live on, I was drawn to the nonlaboring path.""As a man almost completely illiterate and therefore not prepared for any kind of work, I was forced to return to my craft as a barber.""I am as ignorant as a pipe."Golfo Alexopoulos focuses on the lishentsy ("outcasts") of the interwar USSR to reveal the defining features of alien and citizen identities under Stalin's rule. Although portrayed as "bourgeois elements," lishentsy actually included a wide variety of people, including prostitutes, gamblers, tax evaders, embezzlers, and ethnic minorities, in particular, Jews. The poor, the weak, and the elderly were frequent targets of disenfranchisement, singled out by officials looking to conserve scarce resources or satisfy their superiors with long lists of discovered enemies.Alexopoulos draws heavily on an untapped resource: an archive in western Siberia that contains over 100,000 individual petitions for reinstatement. Her analysis of these and many other documents concerning "class aliens" shows how Bolshevik leaders defined the body politic and how individuals experienced the Soviet state. Personal narratives with which individuals successfully appealed to officials for reinstatement allow an unusual view into the lives of "outcasts." From Kremlin leaders to marked aliens, many participated in identifying insiders and outsiders and challenging the terms of membership in Stalin's new society.

Download or read book The Prophet Outcast written by Isaac Deutscher and published by Verso. This book was released on 2003 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This third volume of the trilogy is a self-contained narrative of Trotsky's years in exile and of his murder in Mexico in 1940.

Download or read book Stalin s Terror written by B. McLoughlin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2002-12-11 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The British, Irish, Russian, American, German and Austrian contributors examine the intricate nature of the mass repression unleashed by the Stalinist leader of the USSR during 1937-38. The first part of the collection deals with annihilation policies against the Soviet elite and the Communist International. The second section of the volume looks at mass operations of the secret police (NKVD) against social outcasts, Poles and other 'hostile' ethnic groups. The final section comprises micro-studies about targeted victim groups among the general population.

Download or read book The Outcasts written by Maxim Gorky and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-11-05 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alexei Maximovich Peshkov 28 March [O.S. 16 March] 1868 - 18 June 1936), primarily known as Maxim, was a Russian and Soviet writer, a founder of the socialist realism literary method and a political activist. He was also a five-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Around fifteen years before success as a writer, he frequently changed jobs and roamed across the Russian Empire; these experiences would later influence his writing. Gorky's most famous works were The Lower Depths (1902), Twenty-six Men and a Girl, The Song of the Stormy Petrel, My Childhood, The Mother, Summerfolk and Children of the Sun. He had an association with fellow Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov; Gorky would later mention them in his memoirs. Gorky was active with the emerging Marxist social-democratic movement. He publicly opposed the Tsarist regime, and for a time closely associated himself with Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov's Bolshevik wing of the party. For a significant part of his life, he was exiled from Russia and later the Soviet Union. In 1932, he returned to USSR on Joseph Stalin's personal invitation and died there in June 1936.

Download or read book Illness and Inhumanity in Stalin s Gulag written by Golfo Alexopoulos and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2017-04-25 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new and chilling study of lethal human exploitation in the Soviet forced labor camps, one of the pillars of Stalinist terror In a shocking new study of life and death in Stalin’s Gulag, historian Golfo Alexopoulos suggests that Soviet forced labor camps were driven by brutal exploitation and often administered as death camps. The first study to examine the Gulag penal system through the lens of health, medicine, and human exploitation, this extraordinary work draws from previously inaccessible archives to offer a chilling new view of one of the pillars of Stalinist terror.

Download or read book Stalin s Terror written by B. McLoughlin and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2002-12-11 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The British, Irish, Russian, American, German and Austrian contributors examine the intricate nature of the mass repression unleashed by the Stalinist leader of the USSR during 1937-38. The first part of the collection deals with annihilation policies against the Soviet elite and the Communist International. The second section of the volume looks at mass operations of the secret police (NKVD) against social outcasts, Poles and other 'hostile' ethnic groups. The final section comprises micro-studies about targeted victim groups among the general population.

Download or read book Stalin s Genocides written by Norman M. Naimark and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-19 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The chilling story of Stalin’s crimes against humanity Between the early 1930s and his death in 1953, Joseph Stalin had more than a million of his own citizens executed. Millions more fell victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, bloody massacres, and detention and interrogation by Stalin's henchmen. Stalin's Genocides is the chilling story of these crimes. The book puts forward the important argument that brutal mass killings under Stalin in the 1930s were indeed acts of genocide and that the Soviet dictator himself was behind them. Norman Naimark, one of our most respected authorities on the Soviet era, challenges the widely held notion that Stalin's crimes do not constitute genocide, which the United Nations defines as the premeditated killing of a group of people because of their race, religion, or inherent national qualities. In this gripping book, Naimark explains how Stalin became a pitiless mass killer. He looks at the most consequential and harrowing episodes of Stalin's systematic destruction of his own populace—the liquidation and repression of the so-called kulaks, the Ukrainian famine, the purge of nationalities, and the Great Terror—and examines them in light of other genocides in history. In addition, Naimark compares Stalin's crimes with those of the most notorious genocidal killer of them all, Adolf Hitler.

Download or read book Breaking Stalin s Nose written by Eugene Yelchin and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2011-09-27 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Newbery Honor Book. Sasha Zaichik has known the laws of the Soviet Young Pioneers since the age of six: The Young Pioneer is devoted to Comrade Stalin, the Communist Party, and Communism. A Young Pioneer is a reliable comrade and always acts according to conscience. A Young Pioneer has a right to criticize shortcomings. But now that it is finally time to join the Young Pioneers, the day Sasha has awaited for so long, everything seems to go awry. He breaks a classmate's glasses with a snowball. He accidentally damages a bust of Stalin in the school hallway. And worst of all, his father, the best Communist he knows, was arrested just last night. This moving story of a ten-year-old boy's world shattering is masterful in its simplicity, powerful in its message, and heartbreaking in its plausibility. One of Horn Book's Best Fiction Books of 2011

Download or read book The Whisperers written by Orlando Figes and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2008-11-25 with total page 788 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the award-winning author of A People's Tragedy and Natasha's Dance, a landmark account of what private life was like for Russians in the worst years of Soviet repression There have been many accounts of the public aspects of Stalin's dictatorship: the arrests and trials, the enslavement and killing in the gulags. No previous book, however, has explored the regime's effect on people's personal lives, what one historian called "the Stalinism that entered into all of us." Now, drawing on a huge collection of newly discovered documents, The Whisperers reveals for the first time the inner world of ordinary Soviet citizens as they struggled to survive amidst the mistrust, fear, compromises, and betrayals that pervaded their existence. Moving from the Revolution of 1917 to the death of Stalin and beyond, Orlando Figes re-creates the moral maze in which Russians found themselves, where one wrong turn could destroy a family or, perversely, end up saving it. He brings us inside cramped communal apartments, where minor squabbles could lead to fatal denunciations; he examines the Communist faithful, who often rationalized even their own arrest as a case of mistaken identity; and he casts a humanizing light on informers, demonstrating how, in a repressive system, anyone could easily become a collaborator. A vast panoramic portrait of a society in which everyone spoke in whispers—whether to protect their families and friends, or to inform upon them—The Whisperers is a gripping account of lives lived in impossible times.

Download or read book The Outcasts and Other Stories written by Maksim Gorky and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-11-05 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, primarily known as Maxim, was a Russian and Soviet writer, a founder of the socialist realism literary method and a political activist.[3] He was also a five-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature.[4] Around fifteen years before success as a writer, he frequently changed jobs and roamed across the Russian Empire; these experiences would later influence his writing. Gorky's most famous works were The Lower Depths (1902), Twenty-six Men and a Girl, The Song of the Stormy Petrel, My Childhood, The Mother, Summerfolk and Children of the Sun. He had an association with fellow Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov; Gorky would later mention them in his memoirs. Gorky was active with the emerging Marxist social-democratic movement. He publicly opposed the Tsarist regime, and for a time closely associated himself with Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov's Bolshevik wing of the party. For a significant part of his life, he was exiled from Russia and later the Soviet Union. In 1932, he returned to USSR on Joseph Stalin's personal invitation and died there in June 1936.

Download or read book Everyday Stalinism written by Sheila Fitzpatrick and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1999-03-04 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on urban areas in the 1930s, this college professor illuminates the ways that Soviet city-dwellers coped with this world, examining such diverse activities as shopping, landing a job, and other acts.

Download or read book Khrushchev s Cold Summer written by Miriam Dobson and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2011-10-15 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between Stalin's death in 1953 and 1960, the government of the Soviet Union released hundreds of thousands of prisoners from the Gulag as part of a wide-ranging effort to reverse the worst excesses and abuses of the previous two decades and revive the spirit of the revolution. This exodus included not only victims of past purges but also those sentenced for criminal offenses. In Khrushchev's Cold Summer Miriam Dobson explores the impact of these returnees on communities and, more broadly, Soviet attempts to come to terms with the traumatic legacies of Stalin's terror. Confusion and disorientation undermined the regime's efforts at recovery. In the wake of Stalin's death, ordinary citizens and political leaders alike struggled to make sense of the country's recent bloody past and to cope with the complex social dynamics caused by attempts to reintegrate the large influx of returning prisoners, a number of whom were hardened criminals alienated and embittered by their experiences within the brutal camp system. Drawing on private letters as well as official reports on the party and popular mood, Dobson probes social attitudes toward the changes occurring in the first post-Stalin decade. Throughout, she features personal stories as articulated in the words of ordinary citizens, prisoners, and former prisoners. At the same time, she explores Soviet society's contradictory responses to the returnees and shows that for many the immediate post-Stalin years were anything but a breath of spring air after the long Stalinist winter.

Download or read book Stalin s Daughter written by Rosemary Sullivan and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning author of Villa Air-Bel returns with a painstakingly researched, revelatory biography of Svetlana Stalin, a woman fated to live her life in the shadow of one of history's most monstrous dictators, her father, Josef Stalin. Born in the early years of the Soviet Union, Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin. Communist Party privilege protected her from the mass starvation and purges that haunted Russia, but she did not escape tragedy, the loss of everyone she loved, including her mother, two brothers, aunts and uncles, and a lover twice her age, deliberately exiled to Siberia by her father. As she gradually learned about the extent of her father's brutality after his death, Svetlana could no longer keep quiet and in 1967 shocked the world by defecting to the United States -- leaving her two children behind. But although she was never a part of her father's regime, she could not escape his legacy. Her life in America was fractured; she moved frequently, married disastrously, shunned other Russian exiles, and ultimately died in poverty in Spring Green, Wisconsin. With access to KGB, CIA, and Soviet government archives, as well as the close cooperation of Svetlana's daughter, Rosemary Sullivan pieces together Svetlana's incredible life in a masterful account of unprecedented intimacy. Epic in scope, it's a revolutionary biography of a woman doomed to be a political prisoner of her father's name. Sullivan explores a complicated character in her broader context without ever losing sight of her powerfully human story, in the process opening a closed, brutal world that continues to fascinate us.

Download or read book The OUTCASTS and OTHER STORIES by MAXIM GORKY written by Maksim Gorky and published by . This book was released on 2017-11-10 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The High Street consists of two rows of one-storeyed hovels, squeezed close one against another; old hovels with leaning walls and crooked windows, with dilapidated roofs, disfigured by time, patched with shingles, and overgrown with moss; here and there above them rise tall poles surmounted with starling houses, whilst the roofs are shaded by the dusty green of pollard willows and elder bushes, the sole miserable vegetation of suburbs where dwell the poorest classes.The windows of these hovels, their glass stained green with age, seem to watch each other with the shifty, cowardly glance of thieves. Up the middle of the street crawls a winding channel passing between deep holes, washed out by the heavy rain; here and there lie heaps of old, broken bricks and stones overgrown with weeds, the remains of the various attempts made from time to time by the inhabitants to build dwellings; but these attempts have been rendered useless by the torrents of stormwater sweeping down from the town above. On the hill nestle, amongst the luxuriant green of gardens, magnificent stone-built houses; the steeples of churches rise proudly towards the blue heavens, their golden crosses glittering in the sun.In wet weather the town pours into this outlying suburb all its surface water, and in the dry weather all its dust, and this miserable row of hovels has the appearance of having been swept down at one of these moments by some powerful hand.Crushed into the ground, these half-rotten human shelters seem to cover all the hill, whilst, stained by the sun, by the dust, and by the rains, they take on them the dirty nondescript colour of old decaying wood.At the end of this miserable street stood an old, long, two-storeyed house, which seemed to have been cast out in this way from the town, and which had been bought by the merchant Petounnikoff. This was the last house in the row, standing just under the hill, and stretching beyond it were fields, ending at a distance of half a verst from the house in an abrupt fall towards the river. This large and very old house had a more sinister aspect than its neighbours; all its walls were crooked, and in its rows of windows there was not one that had preserved its regular form; whilst the remnants of the window panes were of the dirty green colour of stagnant water.The spaces between the windows were disfigured with discoloured patches of fallen plaster, as if time had written the history of the house in these hieroglyphics. Its roof, sagging forwards towards the street, increased its pathetic aspect; it seemed as if the house were bowing itself towards the ground, and were humbly waiting for the last stroke of fate to crumble it into dust, or into a deformed heap of half-rotten ruins.The front gates were ajar. One side, torn from its hinges, lay on the ground, and from the cracks between the boards sprang grass, which also covered the great desolate yard. At the farther end of this yard stood a low, smoke-blackened shed with an iron roof. The house itself was uninhabited, but in this mean shed, which had been a forge, was installed a common lodging-house or doss-house, kept by a retired cavalry officer, Aristide Fomitch Kouvalda.Inside, this doss-house appeared as a long, dark den, lighted by four square windows and a wide door. The brick unplastered walls were dark with smoke, which had also blackened the ceiling. In the middle stood a large stove, round which, and along the walls, were ranged wooden bunks containing bundles of rubbish which served the dossers for beds. The walls reeked with smoke, the earthen floor with damp, and the bunks with sweat and rotten rags.

Download or read book Stalin and His Hangmen written by Donald Rayfield and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 592 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has a strong historical and political orientation but its main focus is the psychological chain that connected Stalin with those men he chose as executioners, in both the narrow and broad sense of the world. His successful manipulations depended on an attraction to figures like himself to laconic and ruthless controllers. To understand Stalin, the reader must understand the background of his life - abused child, trainee priest, resentful victim of imperial power, bandit and puppet master.

Download or read book Khrushchev s Cold Summer written by Miriam Dobson and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This outstanding book examines the return of prisoners from the Gulag in the Soviet Union during the first decade after the death of Stalin."—Choice

Download or read book Stalin and Stalinism written by Martin McCauley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-04-19 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most successful dictators of the twentieth century, Stalin transformed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union into one of the world’s leading political parties. Stalin and Stalinism explores how he ammassed, retained and deployed power to dominate, not only his close associates, but the population of the Soviet Union and Soviet Empire. Moving from leader to autocrat and finally despot, Stalin played a key role in shaping the first half of the twentieth century with, at one time, around one-third of the planet adopting his system. His influence lives on – despite turning their backs on Stalin’s anti-capitalism in the later twentieth century, countries such as China and Vietnam retain his political model – the unbridled power of the Communist Party. First published in 1983, Stalin and Stalinism has established itself as one of the most popular textbooks for those who want to understand the Stalin phenomenon. This updated fourth edition draws on a wealth of new publications, and includes increased discussion on culture, religion and the new society that Stalin fashioned as well as more on spying, Stalin's legacy, and his character as well as his actions. Supported by a chronology of key events, Who’s Who and Guide to Further Reading, this concise assessment of one of the major figures of the twentieth-century world history remains an essential read for students of the subject.